“India has once again challenged the UN's climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a new scientific paper that suggests human-induced global warming is much less than what the R K Pachauri-led IPCC claims.

“The paper identifies the reduced impact of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) on the formation of low clouds over earth in the last 150 years as the main cause for global warming. The paper is authored by U R Rao, former chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation, and was released by environment minister Jairam Ramesh.”

Source: “New paper suggests greenhouse gases not primary cause of global warming”, domain-b.com, Jan 21, 2010

http://www.domain-b.com/environment/20110121_global_warming.html

If anyone wants to critique it:

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/25jan2011/223.pdf

Here we go again with GCRs....sigh.  I'll have a look at the paper, but GCRs are way out of my field.  I'm sure that someone in the know will refute is shortly.

It is a relatively obsure journal (Impact factor about 0.8).   The paper seems to have been peer-reviewed, albeit rather quickly:

 "Received 20 September 2010; revised accepted 15 December 2010"

Albatross

The fact that the paper was released by India's environment minister is perhaps more sgnifiant than what journal it was published in.

You are probably correct Badger...but I am not familiar with the politics in India (or individuals involved), at least how they pertain to AGW.

I do think I see what you mean, it is like Canada's environment minister recently defending the tar sands.

Wow there is almost no substance in that paper at all.  The entirety of the analysis boils down to this:

"A 8% decrease in galactic cosmic ray intensity during the last 150 years as derived from 10Be records will cause a decrease of 2.0% absolute in low cover clouds[12] which in turn will result in increasing earth’s radiation budget by 1.1 Wm–2, which is about 60% of the estimated increase of 1.66 Wm–2 forcing due to increased CO2 emission during the same period."

That's it.  No new data, no new analysis.  They don't even dispute the fact that there's no trend in GCR flux on Earth or solar magnetic field in the past 60 years, during which time we've seen most of the global warming.  Reference 12 is:

Lee, S. H. et al., Particle formation by ion nucleation in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. Science, 2003, 301, 1886.

Unfortunately Google Scholar doesn't yield a free copy of that paper.

I read a press release on this paper.  It basically implied that Rao is the only scientist on the planet studying the effects of GCRs and the IPCC is ignoring their effects.  Total crap.

For further info, see my post on GCRs.  Sadly, my blog post/rebuttal had a lot more detail than this peer-reviewed paper.  And frankly, more data analysis too.  Maybe this journal will publish me too :-)

Dana and Dan,

Good sleuthing Dana.

"A 8% decrease in galactic cosmic ray intensity during the last 150 years as derived from 10Be records will cause a decrease of 2.0% absolute in low cover clouds..."

Wow, talk about talking in absolutes and pinning all your deductions on one (and irrelevant)  tether.... Not only that they talk about changes in low clouds and the Lee paper talks about the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.  Quite the mess IMHO, and probably should not have made it through the review process.

The Ville,

The much anticipated results form the CLOUD project remind me of Anthony's much touted surfacestatins.org.  Much talk, many promises, but no results.  Seems to be all about keeping the hype (or is that hope?) going.

To be fair though, all CERN projects obviously suffered some major delays after they had to shut down.  We'll see....

Dana, free registration allows you to download papers older than 1 year.

Oh well geez, now I feel stupid.  Apparently I had already registered with Science at some point, too!

The Lee et al paper (Rao's reference #12, which is the basis of his entire conclusion) barely even discusses GCRs.  I really don't see how it substantiates the statement that:

"A 8% decrease in galactic cosmic ray intensity during the last 150 years as derived from 10Be records will cause a decrease of 2.0% absolute in low cover clouds[12] which in turn will result in increasing earth’s radiation budget by 1.1 Wm–2, which is about 60% of the estimated increase of 1.66 Wm–2 forcing due to increased CO2 emission during the same period."

I don't see how you could possibly draw that conclusion from that paper.  But that seems to be exactly what Rao did.  I don't know - am I missing something?

The reference number is wrong, it should be 13 (Veizer 2005). I do not have access to the paper, but here's Realclimate rebuttal.

Geez they didn't even get their referencing right?  What a crappy paper.  Seems like a peer-reviewer or editor should have caught that.

So basically this paper is just echoing Veizer 2005, which sounds like a pretty crappy paper too (except I'm guessing that Veizer at least got his references correct).  So basically this is an even crappier re-tread of a crappy paper?

I'll try to take a look later.

I spoke to Wolfendale a while back (and he seemed unhappy about deniers, lol), and Harrison & Lockwood are in my department so I can try and run it past them if there's anything I don't get!